Star Wars: Ahsoka

But Anakin had given them to her. She’d walked away from the Jedi Temple with nothing but the clothes on her back and had struggled for a long time to find a new place in the galaxy. When she had found a mission, when she had reached out to her former master for help, he had reached back and given her the Jedi weapons to do the job. He’d accepted her return, and it felt like a failure to leave the lightsabers behind a second time.

She turned them on and told herself that it was their incandescent green glow in the dark night that made her eyes water. How many Jedi were buried with their lightsabers today? How many weren’t buried at all but left behind like so much garbage, their weapons taken as trophies? The younglings, had they known what to do? Who could they ask once their teachers had been cut down? Surely, there had been some mercy for—

She knelt, extinguishing the energy, and planted the hilts of both her weapons in the freshly turned dirt.

She stood quickly and resisted the urge to call the lightsabers back into her hands. They must be left there, memorializing the man they were recorded as having killed, a trophy for the coming Imperials to find.

And they were coming. Ahsoka could feel it in her bones. She had a ship, unremarkable and well built. Rex was already gone, his false death inscribed on the marker in front of her and the false report of her death at his hands credited there as well. When they were digging the grave, they had agreed to separate and head for the Outer Rim. It was chaotic there, but it was the sort of chaos where a person could get lost. The chaos on the Core worlds was motivated by Palpatine’s new peace, and if Ahsoka tried to hide herself there, it would be only a matter of time until she was found.

She placed a hand on the grave marker and allowed herself one more moment to think about the man who was buried there and about the man who wasn’t. She thought about her master, whom she could no longer sense, and the other Jedi, whose absence was like an open airlock in her lungs. With determination, she shut it. She stopped looking for Anakin through the connection they shared. She stopped remembering the clones, alive and dead.